TAG2019-UCL

We are currently living in a time where past conflicts are lavishly commemorated, contemporary ones being followed on the world stage, while future ones dreaded with fear. Across the world, past and present conflicts and their heritages are being instrumentalized for the formation of national identities, as well as patriotic and nationalistic sentiments, and therefore holding a crucial role in ongoing shifts and changes of contemporary politics.During this session we seek papers from different social and historical contexts, which offer theoretical frameworks and/or case study approaches to various pathways of remembering and commemorating conflicts between 19th and 21st century, both in private and public domains.

Understanding memory as a contested process, we aim to examine the political, moral and ethical dynamics of post-conflict remembrance through institutional and individual efforts. The physicality/tangibility of remembrance through (for example) memorabilia, art, fashion, literature, memorials and monuments, private and public museum displays, often appears to have been the focus of various commemorative efforts and academic works. However, during this session we also invite papers exploring intangible aspects of remembrance through sound, music, oral histories and ethnographies. This will give us the opportunity to discuss and compare different disciplinary approaches and boundaries within the field of conflict memory. We are particularly interested in papers that explore one or more of the following topics:

Commemorations and politics
Ownership of the past
Commemoration and identity
Morality of remembrance
Physicality of commemoration

Organisers: Luisa Nienhaus; UCL Institute of Archaeology • Lisheng Zhang; UCL

9:30 | Luisa Nienhaus, UCL Institute of Archaeology; Lisheng Zhang, UCL | Introduction

9:45 | Ke Ye, UCL Institute of Archaeology | No monuments but a process: 70 years of retrieving looted artefacts

10:00 | Hannah Wilson, Nottingham Trent University | The Material Memory of Sobibór Death Camp: Archaeology, Artefacts and Commemoration

10:15 | Xavier Rubio-Campillo, University of Edinburgh, School of History, Classics and Archaeology / Murphy’s Toast Games | Glorious and forgotten: the remembrance of air warfare in the Spanish Civil War

10:30 | Georgia Andreou, University of Southampton | Archaeology? The materiality of post-1963 Cyprus

10:45 | Session organisers | Discussion

11:00 | - | BREAK

11:30 | Ryan Nolan, University College Dublin | Excluding the North? Marginalised memory and the legacies of conflict in the Centenary Commemorations of the 1916 Rising in Ireland

11:45 | Susan Shay, University of Cambridge | Courtroom Narrative Construction as a Tool for Indigenous Empowerment: Confronting the Authorized Past through Legal Land Claims

12:00 | Iida Käyhkö, Royal Holloway, University of London | ‘Don’t mourn, organise!’: remembrance and political activism

12:15 | Helia Marçal, Independent Researcher / Tate, London | Remembering conflict: performance art, participation, and intergenerational transmission

12:30 | Session organisers | Discussion

13:00 | - | END